There's a New Record Price for L.A. Real Estate. But Is the House Cursed?

The Fleur-de-Lys in the Holmby Hills section of Beverly Hills sat on the market for seven long years, at the asking price of $125 million. In the final deal, the owner knocked off $23 million and the mystery buyer paid cash.

It would be tough work to haunt a $102 million house that covers 55,000 square feet in Beverly Hills—that's just too much space for even the most go-getter ghost. Maybe a place that big requires a curse that can span centures? The record-setting home, built in 2002 and christened the Fleur-de-Lys in honor of the palace it was modeled after, the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte 35 miles south of Paris, has in fact suffered some consistently bad luck: just a couple years after David and Suzanne Saperstein built the digs, the man in the family took a hankering for their Swedish nanny, Hillavi Svensson, and the original owners parted ways. The divorce settlement, rumored to be upwards of $500 million, included the Fleur-de-Lys as part of the total compensation package. But money being what it is in Los Angeles, Suzanne Saperstein soon put the home on the market, where it remained for seven long years, at the suitably baroque asking price of $125 million.

To construct the original chateau in 1648, Nicholas Fouquet, the minister of finance for King Louis XIV, demolished three entire villages then employed the displaced people in its construction. (That's Fouquet's place above, as it looks today, but chez Saperstein could pass for its identical twin.) When the peasants finished the work, the ensuing housewarming party, with a guest list that included the sun king himself, kicked off with a play by Moliere, and ended with the owner himself imprisoned for life—palace intrigue at its best. Could we attribute the turn of events to black magic? The French are acknowledged masters of the art of cursing. And it's not all that Hollywood to imagine some gifted Frenchman casting an evil eye powerful enough to curse not just the original chateau but also any house erected in its likeness ever, anywhere on earth, even one built four centuries later, just a few ticks north of Sunset Boulevard.

The buyer of the home is said to be Michael Milken, who grew up about 14 miles away, in Encino. Tax correspondence associated with the sale was directed to the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, or, more specifically to lawyers housed at that address who had represented Michael Milken in the past. Despite the evidence, Milken's lawyers vehemently deny any connection. One hint that they might be fibbing? The house was paid for in cash—small change for a man who paid $1.1 billion dollars in total fines related to securities violations at Drexel Burnham Lambert. And it's quite an upgrade from his former digs at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, a minimum security prison outside San Francisco, where he served two years in a room with three other prisoners.